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After getting back to the Tech Nottingham Slack #general channel, Tom asked how I chose the people for the podcast. It’s made me take a step back and remind myself where I was, what I was doing and who, in no small part, was responsible for this.

I’ve mentioned before that the idea for Twine Radio came from being part of the Nottingham Tech community and being inspired by the Christmas Party that Tech Nottingham organised two years ago.

At each Tech Nottingham event Andrew Seward reminds us of the driving force behind Tech Nottingham is principally to “make Nottingham a better place to live and work in technology”. And the call to action is to talk to one another, to share ideas, meet new people, make new connections.

So as I was reflecting on recording another Twine Radio podcast, I reminded myself I was doing just that. Going out and meeting new people, recording their stories and helping them spread the word about more opportunities to do all of the above.

It’s not that Nottingham wasn’t already the host of some of the UK’s best tech talent. It’s not that Nottingham wasn’t full of people doing creative and interesting things with technology. It’s not that we weren’t blogging & sharing things individually.

However, it’s in no small part through his enthusiasm, energy and passion that Andrew Seward has lit a fire in the hearts of those who have heard his “call to arms”.

And to hammer home the point, on the same day, Andrew was out and about spreading the word at Experian and then London.

Let’s just pause and remind ourselves that Friday was Andrew’s birthday. He was like “nope, no celebrating for me, I need to go out and network & spread the word for Nottingham!”

Thank you Andrew for all the inspiration, hard work & dedication that has made us come together in ways we’d never have thought of. Long may it continue. You are a true asset to Nottingham and we’re lucky to have you fighting our corner.

The wait is over. Winter may be coming but so is Hack24 2016 and I can’t wait. Clear your calendar for the weekend of 19th & 20th March 2016 because you’ll want to be free to take part in this excellent event.

The first Hack24 was such a roaring success I’m sure 2016’s event will build on the great work all the team put in across the board.

Of course, they’re going to keep us on the edge of our seats for a while longer to find out exactly where it’ll take place, when the tickets will be available & all of the sponsorship news as it unfolds. This truly feels like an early Christmas present 🙂

If you’d like to sponsor Hack24 2016 get in touch with them at http://www.hack24.co.uk/sponsor/

There’s lots of exciting things going on in Nottingham at the moment. In fact as a city there’s always been a buzz around the place; an ‘anything is possible’ feeling all the way from the City Council down to those who live and work in it. We are also lucky to have a strong technology sector based in the city in a wide range of sectors.

The buzz is not limited to energy applied within companies as we’re lucky to have a community of like-minded individuals willing and keen to share ideas, passions and best practices in community events out of business hours.

It’s based on the great foundation of GeekUp Nottingham which Gemma Cameron setup in 2010. I’ve been an attendee and a speaker on a small handful of occasions and thoroughly enjoy the chance to meet up and share ideas with people I don’t get the chance to chat to in my day to day job at Esendex.

I’m pleased and supportive of the rebranding to Tech Nottingham for two main reasons.

First is that I personally don’t feel the event to date has gained much from the association with the GeekUp brand. It’s a good ‘ice breaker’ to give people a clue to what it might be about. However it also has the potential with the word ‘Geek’ to maybe turn some folk away.

I’m sure each GeekUp in the land is different and there is no right or wrong way to run one. I’ve just not witnessed any central ‘force’ pushing the success of GeekUps; no cross-retweeting, no central campaigning, no push to local media etc.
The success of GeekUp in Nottingham has been very much down to Gemma, Andrew Seward (its current Captain) and its members. So I don’t think breaking association harms the event at all.

Secondly, Tech Nottingham is aiming to continue to differentiate from other tech social events in the area by throwing its net even wider. The successful format already sees talks by experts intersperced with katas, dojos and retrospectives to name but a few of the different session types tried over the years.

This exciting mission statement is the perfect time for a rebrand to something that can reflect all that it is hoped this community can become. It’s also clear that Andrew is looking to the members themselves to help him deliver this which I look forward to seeing how I can assist.

Personally being involved with GeekUp and other community projects like Code Club is that it’s not just personal development that can come out of voluntarily meeting up with other folk. There’s a chance to continue to share the knowledge to a wider, even non technical, audience through activities that can benefit others than the participants. The simplest goal of making others know that there’s meet ups like this

After having updated Jenkins to the latest Long Term Service release (1.509.4) I wanted to ensure the Windows Slave Agents that we’ve got running were up to date. The Windows Slave agents had previously been installed using the Java Web Start process and then turned into Windows Service slave agents.

To reinstall the Slave Agents we had to do the following:

Stop the ‘Jenkins Slave’ Windows service

Launch a Command Prompt (ensuring its run as an Administrator)

type the following (assuming your Slave Agent was installed at c:jenkins)

On a Windows 7 machine that already had Windows Git bash version 1.7.9-preview20120201 on it, I wanted to add ‘hitch’. Hitch is a great little Ruby program that manipulates the Git author settings to properly attribute pair programming work. Rather than a commit having a single author, Hitch creates a unique email address from a known base email address and adding the pair names after a + symbol.

This is useful as when we push code up to GitHub it becomes clear which pair have been working on a task. You can also create a Gravatar for the unique concatenated email address so the pair combination can have their own logo too.

The installation is simple: gem install ruby. The Windows machine didn’t have Ruby on it so I went to Ruby Installers for Windows and downloaded v1.9.3-p125. make sure you tick the box in the install wizard to add the Ruby executables to your PATH. When Git Bash starts it’s loaded with the Windows PATH settings anyway so it should be able to find Ruby to install hitch.

Hitch itself is a breeze to setup using your GitHub usernames.hitch username1 username2

Hitch will ask if you want to add the usernames to its local hitch_pairs files to save you entering their full name again. Enter their full name and you’re good to go. Now each subsequent git commit will have the correct author information. Pair programming is great and Hitch allows both members of the pair to have their work attributed.

It seems UK manufacturers end up paying tax on components, but if they get the boards made overseas and then shipped over then that’s ok because they’re completed products rather than raw materials. Bottom line is that this insanity means that foreign outsourcing of manufacturing gets even more attractive.

So in these times of austerity it would seem the sensible thing to do to support UK manufacturing by lobbying for a change in those tax laws. We have a lot of manufacturing talent in the UK and we should be supporting it.

In the process of moving a .co.uk domain over to 1&1 for someone this week, I encountered the undocumented status code of ‘Domain Update Done’.

The domain had previously shown as ‘Ready’ in the control panel and I was able to set the server and mailserver for them using 1&1’s nameserver.

The gotcha is that during the ‘Domain Update Done’ status you can’t swap the nameserver settings. You can still get to change the A and MX records with 1&1’s Nameserver but if you wanted to point it to an external nameserver you’ll have to wait until this status clears.

The official word I got from 1&1 support says : “Domain Update Done status means that a domain is already on its last phase of propagation and normally, this will take 24-48 hours.”

So just be warned that if you want to change your initial settings when transferring a domain, you might get locked out while the domain is being finalised on your account.

Given the size Facebook has grown to, it has an obvious ‘elephant in the corner’ for those willing to step back from their time-line for a minute. Those users who are only interested in friends, photos and now location-based checkins too might miss the fact that Facebook is data-mining on a grand scale.

The debate about the public visibility of your data has grabbed the media’s attention. What’s given less coverage is the missing ability for you to easily use and share the data you’ve chosen to store with Facebook elsewhere on the internet.

Google have recently changed their terms of service on their Contacts API in a seemingly simple way, but with hopefully bigger consequences. GigaOm summised in their article about this by saying “Third-party apps and services can’t pull data from Google without allowing Google to do the same with their data”.

We shall have to see whether linking with Google Contacts in Gmail etc. to find new friends to connect to on Facebook is enough to force Facebook to apply a can-opener to their own APIs.

The simple application went on to output some simple log lines to test using the Gibraltar appender. All was fine, except this simple console application appeared to hang on exit. I quit the running application and Gibraltar dutifully announced that my session had Crashed.

A bit of headscratching later made me realise that I needed to be a better Log4Net citizen in my sample application. I had omitted the line:

Log.Logger.Repository.Shutdown();

Now my code properly stopped its logging activities before the program exited and Gibraltar was able to report successfully. The Log4Net RollingFileAppender or ConsoleAppenders don’t complain like this on program exit if the repository isn’t shutdown first but it does makes sense to tidy up after yourself rather than relying on the garbage collector.

I’ll write more about my positive experiences of Gibraltar in another post, but just wanted to share this in case any early adopters faced the same ‘facepalm’.